The author crosses eight time zones and covers 10,000 miles in an attempt to get to the beating heart of the Russia. This is a personal odyssey and a mesmerizing account of a country undergoing economic, cultural and political change.[...]

This is a unique single-volume history of the road to El Alamein - 'the end of the beginning' - and the bloody battle that followed...It was the British victory at the Battle of El Alamein in November 1942 that inspired one of Churchill's most famous aphorisms: 'it is not the end nor is it the begin[...]